Fashion is increasingly technological – The Post

The Costume Institute Gala the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the event of the season in New York: attracts the attention of celebrities, fashion experts and the national press. This year the sponsor of the exhibition accompanying the event is not a famous brand accessories or clothing but Apple; last year was instead funded by Yahoo. The more cynical these sponsorships will go back to mind the marriages of the nineteenth century between the American heiress and a European aristocrat, from which the bride and groom’s lineage obtained a fortune. Today Silicon Valley puts the money, while the prestige think about New York and Hollywood. The alliance between fashion and technology may seem strange: usually one tends to despise the other. “On the one hand there is the world of technology, which has always considered one of the less fashionable:” we are the geeks, why should we put ourselves in making clothes or shoes? ‘, “Says Dolly Singh, founder and CEO of Thesis Couture, a start-up in Los Angeles who is redesigning heeled shoes, ‘and the other is the world of high-level fashion that snubs the technology: “They want to put lights and gadgets everywhere. Is not that ridiculous? “”.

For the designers who are willing to collaborate with the experts of the digital production techniques technology have an opportunity to develop new aesthetic and functional forms. Unlike wearable devices, which integrate computer inside of clothes and accessories in this case is the technology – not fashion – to be the center. Think, for example, the highlight of the exhibition at the Met “Manus x Machina: Fashion in an Age of Technology” ( “Hand x machine: fashion in the era of technology”), which will be inaugurated on May 5 in New York: a dress wedding of Karl Lagerfeld in neoprene with a train from the very elaborate embroidery, which was drawn by hand, scanned the computer and then “pixelated”. Seen from a distance the fancy dress, made up of artificial diamonds and pearls seems a simple Baroque style; looking closely at the work stands out instead to digital.

Courtesy of CHANEL Collection Patrimoine (Nicholas Alan Cope)

“For me the technology is a creative tool, not a functional end product,” says Andrew Bolton, the chief curator of the Costume Institute. “The exhibition is dedicated to fashion in the age of technology, not to fashion and technology in themselves; examines materials and techniques that have had practical applications in the field of fashion, such as laser cutting.

The exhibition” #techstyle “, in progress at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, highlights the same techniques. Some remarkable pieces – like a suit of silver leather cut to Giles Deacon laser, or a dress made with digital printing for the collection “Plato’s Atlantis” by Alexander McQueen – represent the luxury version of the processes that have already transformed the look and the perception of the clothes we wear every day. Other “works” seem to haute couture as the symbol piece of the exhibition: a complete formed by a skirt and a cape that seems covered with small rubber shellfish. The outer shell was made by combining rigid and soft silicone plastic sheets, created with 3D printing and then sewn on an inner liner. “In a way it’s a dress made by hand, but has been made using the best technology,” said exhibition curator Michelle Finamore. To realize the full Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen has worked with Blacks Oxman of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which publishes articles with titles like “multi-scale thermal stability of a rigid thermoplastic material based on proteins.”

Collaborations of this type are becoming more frequent. “To make clothes and accessories like this type designers need specialists who have the technological skills and know how to write the code, program and use a 3D printer,” says Finamore. “Successful designers collaborate with those who know the means and the process. Do not just say: “This is the model I want to accomplish. Now someone think of how to do it. ” We must start work on the design and implementation gown. ” The same goes for shoes. A Thesis Couture, Singh has used the contacts he had developed a Space X and Oculus VR to working scientists, engineers and materials specialists who had never worked in fashion, along with experts of shoes, including an orthopedic surgeon and craftsmen traditional shoes. The goal was to reinvent the stiletto heel by using advanced materials and engineering structures. Starting from a mold of the foot Singh, they used a computer model to figure out how to make a shoe with a heel that does not it loaded too much of the body weight on the front of the foot. “It took two years to figure out how to magically reduce the weight advantage of the geometry ‘, thus rising by 80 per cent by weight to about 50 percent. One of the key technologies is 3D printing, which made it possible to test different versions of the various parts of the shoe before investing in molds and expensive tools. Singh says that without 3D printing would never have come at the head of an issue so fundamental, since for several metal cutting need much money. Following the Tesla model, Thesis Couture is planning to market this fall a limited edition of 1,500 pairs of shoes at $ 925, and then go out to do three models from $ 350 to one in the winter, and then collect them from the shelves in spring. It remains to be seen whether a heeled shoe designed by scientists succeed in bridging the gap between the fashion and the technology community. As in the case of exhibitions, however, also he points out that Thesis Couture between the two worlds there is an increasingly close relationship despite the mutual contempt, fashion and technology share the will to experiment and novelty seeking.

© 2016 – Bloomberg